Academic staff

Modules taught

Undergraduate

• U67003 World Literature
• U67013 Crticial Theory in Action
• U67031 American Vistas: Literature and Culture of the USA
• U67033 The Culture of Modernity
• U67034 The Shock of the New
• Advanced Options: African-American Avant-Gardes
• Advanced Options: Creative Writing

Postgraduate

• P67001 Critical Debates and Methods in Postgraduate English
• P67054 Twentieth Century Texts: American Literature and its Transatlantic Contexts
• P67068 Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
• U67088 Independent Study in English Studies

 

Supervision

• MA dissertations on American and Twentieth/Twenty-first Century Literature Topics
• PhD Supervisor: Avant-Garde Writing, Technology and the Everyday; Transatlantic Receptions of Edgar Allen Poe (completed); Hybridity and the 'American Strain' in Twentieth Century American Poetry (now completed)
• PhD Supervision team: Marilyn Robinson and Communities of Mourning

Eric's first monograph, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism, was published by Edinburgh University Press's Edinburgh Studies in Transaltantic Literature series in 2013. The book investigates how modernist writers interrogated the relationship between physical places, the printed page, and cultural identity in ‘little magazines’, the artist-run journals that fostered literary modernism in the early twentieth century. He has also edited a critical facsimile edition of Williams’s early prose, which features a collection of previously unknown manuscripts by Williams, and critical essays by eminent and emerging Williams scholars. Eric's new project, provisionally titled Cultures of Experiment, engages with technologies (both real and speculative), technographia, and everyday life in avant-garde writing from the First World War to the 1960s. The AGAST Project - an Impact Case Study emerging from this research - seeks to bring dormant and speculative devices designed by writers and artists back to life using new digital technologies.

Research group membership

Eric is the leader of the Medicine, Science and Technology cluster in EML and founder of the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology (AGAST) Project, an interdisciplinary consortium that re-creates the inventions of twentieth-century writers and artists using Augmented Reality. 

Further information

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-transatlantic-avant-gardes.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0DOp107-G8&t=

/poetry-centre/projects/avant-gardes-and-speculative-technology/

 

Books

• White E, Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic: Avant-Gardes, Technology and the Everyday, Edinburgh University Press (2020)
  ISBN: 9781474441490 eISBN: 9781474441520
  Abstract

  Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist vanguardists used technology not only as a means of analysing and critiquing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by the poet Mina Loy, and revealing the untold story of Bob and Rose Brown’s infamous reading machines, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From Dazzle Camouflage to Reading Machines, and from rail networks to broadcast technology, White explores how avant-gardes combined technicity and aesthetics to provoke socio-political change and to explore new modes of being modern.
  

  Website 
• White E, The early career of William Carlos Williams: a critical facsimile edition of uncollected prose and manuscripts, Texas Tech University Press (2013)
  Website 
• White E, Transatlantic avant-gardes: little magazines and localist modernism, Edinburgh University Press (2013)
  ISBN: 9780748645213
  Abstract ransatlantic Avant-Gardesoffers a revisionary account of the evolution of twentieth-century modernism. Complimenting recent studies of modernist expatriates, Eric White explores new points of contact between European and American avant-gardes to place ‘located' figures such as William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, and Alfred Kreymborg back into the 'global design' of literary modernism. Focusing on artist-run 'little magazines' (includingOthers, Contact, The Little Review, Blast, The Dial, Fire!!,andPagany) and selected fine press publications and mainstream periodicals, White also reconsiders the boundaries that traditionally divide modernist literature into 'exile' and 'localist', or 'regionalist' and 'cosmopolitan', factions. Thus, the book proposes a version of localist modernism that prioritises issues of geographic and textual 'location' to deliver a 'networked' approach to American modernism in the transatlantic context. Combining literary-historical, textual, and cultural criticism,Transatlantic Avant-Gardesprovides a new reading of the specialised literary networks that interrogated the relationship between geographic place, textual space and national identity in the modernist transatlantic.
  

Journal articles

• White E, 'Technicities of Deception: Dazzle Camouflage, Avant-Gardes, and Sensory Augmentation in the First World War'
  Modernist Cultures 12 (1) (2017) pp.36-58
  ISSN: 2041-1022 eISSN: 1753-8629
  Abstract This essay identifies a new form of technicity that emerged in the First World War, in which enhancement and distortion effects generated by sensory augmentation technologies could be manipulated for strategic purposes, by a variety of cultural agents. It argues that dazzle camouflage, a technology developed by the British Admiralty in 1917 to delay and confuse attacking U-boats, exemplifies this mediation of everyday life both on and off the battle fronts. Focusing on the London Vorticists, but also drawing on Futurist precedents, the essay explores how avant-gardes articulated the impact that technicities of augmentation had on modern selfhood.Website 
• White E, ''A machine of mirrors': technology and identity in the modernist transatlantic'
  Symbiosis 17 (2) (2013) pp.69-87
  ISSN: 0334-5114 eISSN: 1878-7665
  
• White E, 'Continent of conjecture: imitation, ephemera, and American canons in Robert McAlmon's contact editions'
  European Journal of American Culture 32 (3) (2013) pp.--
  ISSN: 1466-0407
  
• White E, 'Advertising localist modernism: William Carlos Williams, 'Aladdin Einstein' and the transatlantic avant-garde in Contact'
  European Journal of American Culture 28 (2) (2009) pp.141-165
  ISSN: 1466-0407
  Abstract Critics of early twentieth-century American modernism traditionally divide its key literary figures into two camps: the cosmopolitan"exiles" who expatriated themselves from the United States, and those who stayed at home. However, recent studies have challenged such dichotomies in the modernist canon, and drawing on the emerging field of transatlantic literary studies, this article investigates Contact, a specialized"little magazine" edited by William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon which has been frequently characterized as an exclusively national(ist) project. My argument is that Contact actually represents a sophisticated expression of localist modernism, a specific element of the transatlantic avant-garde that emerged (rather than diverged) from an international network of artist-run journals in the early twentieth century. Using a combination of literary-historical analysis, textual studies practices and extensive archival research, this article focuses on the"Advertising Number" , a special issue of Contact that has until now been overlooked by critics. Albert Einstein's arrival in America initiated a heady collision of avant-garde poetics, mainstream print culture and global economics in the pages of New York's little magazines. In the Advertising Number, Williams enlisted his literary milieu, including a surprising contribution from the"exile" Ezra Pound, to explore a pivotal cultural moment in the evolution of the transatlantic avant-garde.Website 

Book chapters

• White E, 'Canto 32' in Richard Parker (ed.), Readings in the Cantos: Volume 1, (2018)
  ISBN: 9781942954408 eISBN: 9781942954415
  Website 
• White E, 'William Carlos Williams and the Local' in MacGowan C (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams, Cambridge University Press (2016)
  ISBN: 9781107479081 eISBN: 9781316154991
  Website 
• White E, 'In the American grain: Contact (1920-3; 1932) and Pagany: a native quarterly (1930-3)' in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume II, North America 1894-1960, Oxford University Press (2012)
  ISBN: 9780199545810
  

Conferences

 Conferences Organised

• Surrealist Topographies Symposium, Maison Française, Oxford, April 2016 (with Nathalie Aubert)
• 'Avant-Gardes Now!' Symposium, May 2015, Oxford Brookes University (with Niall Munro)
• ‘Modernist Magazines in the Americas: Points of Departure’, December 2012, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford (with Alex Goody and Niall Munro)

Selected Conference Papers, Plenaries, and Panel Chairing

• 'Reading Machines' [TED talk on Bob Brown's Reading Machine and the AGAST Project], TEDx Whitehall, Royal Society, London, Jan 2018 
• 'A Machine of Words, a Machine of Mirrors: William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound and Networked New York', MLA Conference, New York, NY, USA, Jan 2018 
• ‘On the Move and On the Margins: Stranded Expatriates in Globe and The New Review’, North American Periodical Studies/Centre for Travel Writing Studies Symposium, Nottingham Trent University, September 2017
• ‘The Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology Reading Machine’, Digital Exhibition, Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam, August 2017
• ‘The Future's Future is in the Past: Augmented Reality, Digital Humanities, and the Modernist Archive’, invited presentation, Centre for the Digital Humanities, Princeton University, April 2017
• ‘Bob Brown’s Reading Machine: Augmented Technicities and Augmented Selves’, MSA 2017 Conference, Pasedena, CA, USA, November 2016
• Invited paper, ‘Augmented Avant-Gardes’, English Research Seminar, University of Sheffield, May 2016
• ‘Railroad Avenue: Rail Technologies and Periodical Print Culture in African American Modernist Writing', NAPS Periodical and American Studies Symposium, British Library, December 2015
• ‘Pragmatism, Cultural Localism, and Modernism’, ‘Local Modernisms: 1890-1950’, University of Birmingham, June 2015.
• 'Avant-Garde Periodicals and WWI', London Modernism Seminar, Senate House, London, May 2015.
• 'Unfinished Business: Speculation and Modernist Legacies in Avant-Garde Journals',  The Contemporary Small Press: A Symposium, University of Westminster, February 2015.
• '"A Dark, Distorted, Tricky, Mirror": The Aging Machine in Late Modernist Manhattan', 'Late Modernist Manhattan' panel, MLA 2015, Vancouver, CA, January 2015.
• '"What is Under My Nose': William Carlos Williams, Locality and the Modernist Transatlantic', Department of English and Modern Languages Research Seminar Series, Oxford Brookes University, November 2014.
• 'Dazzle Camouflage: Avant-Gardes and Invisibility in WW1', Transatlantic Seminar Series, Department of English, University of Oxford, October 2014.
• 'Modernist Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technologies' presentation, AHRC Science and Culture Ignite! Event, Natural History Museum, London, Wednesday 26th March 2014.
• ‘American Histories: Bricolage, Pastiche, and Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions’, MSA 15 Conference: ‘Everydayness and the Event’, University of Sussex, Brighton, September 2013.
• ‘“Unnatural Mirrors”: the Revolution of the Word in Paris, New York, and London’, Symbiosis Conference, Brunel University, Uxbridge, June 2013.
• Plenary Lecture: ‘Localism and “the Local” in the Modernist Transatlantic’, ‘Mapping the Self’ Symposium, Dec. 2012, Oxford Brookes University. 
• ‘The Transatlantic Avant-Garde, and the Voyage to Pagany’, Modern Languages Association Conference, Seattle, WA, USA, January 2012.
• ‘The Missing Baedeker: The Travel Writing of Pound and Williams’, 24th Ezra Pound International Conference, Senate House, University of London, July 2011.
• ‘American Localist Modernism and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde’, American Literature Graduate Seminar, Rothermere American Insitute, University of Oxford, February 2011.
• ‘“My God † What Eyes”: Bob Brown, Marcel Duchamp, and the Optical Mechanics of Modernism’, European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies Conference 2010, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, 9-11 September 2010
• Co-organiser (with Laura Marcus), ‘Automatic Writing / Automated Reading: Technology and Modernist Legacies’ panel, at the ‘Material Cultures: Technology, Textuality, and Transmission’ Conference, University of Edinburgh, 16-18 July, 2010.
• ‘“Marcel’s Color Machine”: the Technological Improvisations of Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams’, ‘Material Cultures: Technology, Textuality, and Transmission’ Conference, University of Edinburgh, 16-18 July, 2010.
• ‘The Machine Age in Transatlantic Modernism’, ‘Modernism, Cultural Exchange and Transnationality’: The Second Conference of the Modernist Magazines Project, University of Sussex, Brighton, July 2009.
• ‘“See, They Return”: American Modernists in Contact Editions and the transatlantic review’, Scottish Network for Modernist Studies Seminar, the University of Edinburgh, May 2009.
• ‘Technology and American Identity in the Transatlantic Avant-Garde’, STAR (Scotland’s Transatlantic Relations) Research Seminar, IASH, the University of Edinburgh, March 2009.
• ‘Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams in the Transatlantic Context’, Literature Speaker Series, School of English Literature, University of Newcastle, February 2009.
• ‘“A Core About Which/Not a Box Inside Which”: American Modernism Under Construction’, American Studies Seminar, University of Sussex, Brighton, December 2008.
• ‘Modernist Magazines, Transatlantic Print Culture, and the Rise of the Avant-Garde’, plenary lecture, OU Book History Series, Senate House, London, December 2008.
• ‘“Descend into Place”: Cultural Localism and Dislocation in The Exile and Pagany’, presented at the ‘Modernist Magazines and Politics’ Conference, Université du Maine, Le Mans, FR, June 2008.
• ‘The Crowd Master?: Blast and the Question of Audience’, presented at the ‘Wyndham Lewis: Modernity and Critique’ Conference, Birmingham and Midland Institute, January 2008.
• ‘Building an American Avant-Garde: the Early Prose of William Carlos Williams’, Gallup Plenary Lecture, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, January 2008.
• Chair, ‘William Carlos Williams and Little Magazines’ Panel, held at the Annual Modern Languages Association Conference, Chicago, IL, USA, December 2007.
• ‘“Location, Location, Location”: Place and Advertising in Blast, New York Dada, and Contact’, presented at the Modernist Atlantic Conference, De Montfort University, Leicester, July 2007.

Press, publicity and reviews

http://www.alphr.com/art/1005286/augmented-reality-s-future-lies-in-the-1930s-avant-garde